Sunday, December 22, 2013

Window on Eurasia: North Caucasus-Style Repression Spreads to Middle Volga

Paul
Goble

Staunton, December 2 – Articles suggesting
that Islamist radicalism is spreading into Tatarstan and other republics of the
Middle Volga have become more frequent in the Moscow media, but they have
seldom highlighted a disturbing but related development: the introduction into
that region of the kind of repressive measures long a feature of the North Caucasus.

Kidnappings and
tortures by Russian force structures, two Kavpolit.com researchers say, which “earlier
had been considered a sad ‘distinctive feature’ of the North Caucasus ... to
all appearances is spreading to other parts of the Russian Federation,” in the
first instance Tatarstan and the Middle Volga (kavpolit.com/kto-podzhigaet-tatarstan/).

And the way that “spreading” has
occurred, first with largely unsubstantiated charges that there are Wahhabis
about and then with an apparent grant of carte blanche to the police and
security forces to do whatever they need to to destroy them means that any
claims elsewhere that there are Wahhabis about could presage a violent
crackdown against them.

On the one hand, that gives
officials both locally and in Moscow interested in expanding repression an
incentive to claim there are Islamists about just as talking about “enemies of
the people” did in Stalin’s times.And
on the other, if the North Caucasus is any guide, such repression will not
solve the problem but quite possibly radicalize a broader part of society.

For an expert
commentary on this trend, Dzhalilov and Dzhalilova turned to Aydar Khabutdinov,
a professor at the Kazan Branch of the Russian Academy of Jurisprudence. He
characterized the situation in Tatarstan as “a combination of great fear and
distrust,” by a lack of public understanding of what is happening and by
concerns for what will happen next.

This situation is made worse,
Khabutdinov continues, by “the lack of experience with public policy,” given
the level of authoritarianism of the system, and “the extremely contradictory image of Tatarstan” on offer in the media.
On the one hand, officials say that it is a region of “inter-religious and
inter-ethnic tolerance.” But on the other, some have called the republic “a
second Daghestan.”

There
have been some Wahhabis in Tatarstan since the early 2000s, he says, but their
number has been “strongly exaggerated” over the last year following the assassination
of a senior Muslim official in the republic and now after the firebombing of
seven Russian Orthodox churches there.